the true story of sweeney todd
by SweeneyToddRules
Summary: what actually happend to Todd based on true facts
1. Chapter 1

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	2. The actual story

Sweeney Todd was born in 1748, which was a bad time for London. During this time there were the 3 classes of London which were the Gentry, merchants, and the working class. His parents worked in the working class they were silk workers. Sweeney was there only son yet his parents preferred alcohol over him. When he went to the museum he was interested with the torcher devices. At Zoo's he liked how cruel the Zoo keepers were to the animals. He was loved by his mother and beaten by his father. He said " I got forced and kissed and called pretty boy" He did not he testified in court. "But later I used to wish I was strong enough to throttle her. What the devil did she bring me into this world for unless she had plenty of money to give me so that I might enjoy myself in it?"

When he was 12 or 13 it was the coldest year in London. People were dying on the streets left and right. His parents left to go get some gin and never came back. Abandoning their only child to the cruel London life. In his interrogation following his arrest, Sweeney Todd gave this account of his birth and family: "The church I was christened at burnt down the day after, and all the books burned. My mother and father are dead, and the nurse was hanged and the doctor cut his throat." How the young boy managed to survive is a mystery, and the next records pertaining to Sweeney Todd show that the youngster was turned over to the local parish, which was charged with finding apprenticeships for orphans.

Sweeney was turned over to a cutler, the trade responsible for, among other things, manufacturing and sharpening knives and razors. He was charged for a crime 2 years later which was stealing. This was punishable by death but the judge felt sorrow for the orphan so he sent him to prison for 5 years instead. In prison you had to bribe the guards with money to get the arsenals in life but young Todd did not have money. So he convinced the prison guard to hire him to help shave prisoners before execution. The barber taught Sweeney how to steal from the customers as they got the shave. His hatred towards London citizens grew during this time in jail. He final got released from prison at age 19.

There is no report that Todd got married but it is said he was dating a women with "loose morals". A young gentleman, by chance coming into the barber's shop to be shaved and dressed, and being in liquor, mentioned having seen a fine girl in Hamilton Street, from whom he had had certain favours the night before, and at the same time describing her person. The barber, concluding this to be his lover, and in the height of frenzy, cut the young gentleman's throat from the ear to ear and absconded. He was a very jealous man. In court he said that it was true and he cut the man with the now leathal barber tool he said "I sliced him from ear to ear".

Several years later Todd bought a house on fleet street. Which was ver unusal because barbers usualy don't work here. But Todd didn't have the money to go anywhere else also there would be no compition. Early maps of London show that St. Dunstan's and Sweeney Todd's shop were on the north side of Fleet Street, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. Fetter Lane curved in from the east, and Chancery Lane came in from the west, providing a narrow triangular shape to the block where Sweeney's shop was located. One block over from Chancery Lane lay Bell Yard, which intersected the Temple Bar and provided a perpendicular demarcation between Fleet Street and The Strand.

There was a church next to Todd's shop prior to 1784 burnt down multiple times. Beneath the church lays catacombs lay forgotten which were a resting place for some of the deceased. Sweeney somehow learned about these tunnels and learned his way throughout them. 3 years before Todd moved in Fleet Street was a more respectable place in London but when Sweeney moved in this changed drastically. At 186 Fleet Street, between St. Dunstan's Church and the Hen & Chicken Court, Sweeney Todd hung out his shingle with the catchy rhyme "Easy shaving for a penny As good as you will find any." In the window of his shop, Haining reports, Todd made reference to the other, more surgical, duties of a barber. He placed jars with teeth he had pulled and blood he had let, along with wigs made of human hair he had braided. The shop, by all accounts, was a small, dark place, with a single barber chair in the middle of the floor, a bench for waiting customers and a rack filled with combs, scissors and, of course, razors.

It was a two storied house. Upstairs was his living quarters. Then the main floor and of course the basement which would become great use to Sweeney. Using the skills he had learned as a cutler's apprentice, Sweeney Todd built the ingenious device that would help him get rid of the evidence of his crimes. Tying in his cutler's engineering skill, his barber training and the knowledge of the underground tunnels, Sweeney cut a square hole in the center of the floor of his shop. He then attached a pipe to the center of the bottom of the cut out, and fastened the pipe to the ceiling of the basement. Then Sweeney fashioned a series of levers that would allow him to withdraw a latch holding the square in place. When the customer reclined in the chair, his weight would cause the trap door to rotate, tumbling the unwitting victim into the basement below. Another barber chair, fastened to the bottom of the trap door would swing up into place, ready for the next victim.

Usually the fall would kill the victims but sometimes it didn't so he had to rush to the basement to cut the customers throat. There is no pictures of Sweeney Todd but there are descriptions of the demon barber. He is described as a scary-looking character with bright red hair and heavy eyebrows that seemed to meet over his nose. He rarely was in good humor, frequently complaining about the high levels of crime, poverty and drunkenness outside his doorway. His eyes had an evil glimmer, the papers reported upon his arrest. "There was also something very sinister about him with his pale face and reddish hair," wrote Gentleman's Magazine in an 1853 retrospective. "At times he was like some hobgoblin, his strange, dark eyes agleam with greed and cunning." Another later account called him "so repulsive in appearance that it is a wonder that...customers...did not immediately flee when the demon in human frame commenced operations."

As a master, Sweeney Todd showed little compassion for the parish boys he took in as apprentices, and in one case, the knowledge of what his master was up to drove one poor lad to insanity and incarceration in the local madhouse. Sweeney Todd drank alone in the taverns, and he was never seen to touch gin, opting instead for the more refined brandy. Most likely because of his parents.

By this time, Sweeney Todd was clearly an accomplished murderer. The _Daily Courant_, a Fleet Street-published broadsheet, reported a killing in 1785 that almost certainly was committed by Sweeney Todd. "A Cut-Throat Barber," goes the headline in the April 14, 1785 _Courant_. "A horrid murder has been committed in Fleet Street on the person of a young gentleman from the country while on a visit to relatives in London.

"During the course of a walk through the city, he happened to stop to admire the striking clock of St. Dunstan's Church and there fell into a conversation with a man in the clothing of a barber.

"The two men came to an argument, and of a sudden, the barber took from his clothing a razor and slit the throat of the young man, thereafter disappearing into the alleys of Hen and Chicken Court and was seen no more." How he was ever able to escape justice is almost unimaginable; not even the Keystone Cops could have been this ignorant, but somehow, Sweeney Todd evaded the apparently short arm of London Law.

Sweeney Todd's name is brought up in connection with a third murder shortly after. An apprentice, apparently on an errand for his master, stopped off in Todd's shop for a haircut and let loose with the comment that he was carrying a large sum for his employer. That remark sealed his doom, and although the master came looking for the boy in Todd's barbershop, no trace of the boy was ever found and Sweeney Todd was not made to answer for that crime Later, another man who was seen in heated conversation with Sweeney Todd turned up brutally murdered his throat was slit and his back broken. Again Todd was questioned, but nothing came of later killed a Jewish pawnbroker near his shop, but interestingly the murder was excused as "temporary insanity" perhaps a bit of anti-Semitism came into play and once again Todd cheated the hangman.

The only detailed record of a murder occurring in Sweeney Todd's shop is a beadle, or minor security official at St. Bartholomew's Hospital near Fleet Street, who was notorious for his fastidiousness ducked into Todd's shop on his way to work one evening, as he was unhappy with his appearance. Apparently, during conversation with Todd, the beadle, Thomas Shadwell, proudly displayed his gold pocket watch, which had been given for a number of years' service to St. Bart's. Sweeney Todd felt that the watch was worth killing for and dispatched Shadwell via his trap door. No trace was ever found of Shadwell, but his watch was found in a cupboard in Sweeney's home after his arrest.

As more people entered his shop never to be seen again, rumors sprang up in the neighborhood about the mad barber, and whispers of what really went on in his shop were passed from gossip to gossip. No one ever thought to contact the Bow Street Runners, however. "It was true that all sorts of unpleasant rumours and surmises began to be whispered regarding him, but no one could prove that he had anything to do with (the) disappearances."

Sweeney Todd's accomplice is even more shrouded in mystery than the murderous barber himself. Her surname was undoubtedly Lovett, but whether her first name was Margery or Sarah remains a mystery. Mrs. Lovett was a widow, whose first husband had died under mysterious circumstances and no one was ever able to place her in Sweeney Todd's presence in public. The pair were lovers, though, and apparently their passions were fulfilled after a successful murder and butchering job. She liked the finer things in life, considered herself better than her working class background, and used her portion of the profits to furnish silk sheets and fine furniture in her apartment above her Bell Yard bakery. she started using his victims in her meat pies, Todd had been using the abandoned crypts beneath St. Dunstan's church to hide his handiwork. There, he managed to store the bodies amid the dozens of family crypts that time had all but forgotten. But he was running out of room and needed a new way to dispose of his murder victims.

In the basement of the shop was the bakery, and a false wall could be opened to reveal the catacombs behind. It was through this false wall that Todd would apparently deliver his ghastly pie fillings. Barbers in Sweeney Todd's day were more than just hair-cutters and shavers. Their trade extended into all sorts of medicinal acts, and a sick person was just as likely to seek treatment from a barber as from a doctor. All that anatomy training came in handy for Sweeney Todd, who having dumped a victim from his barber chair, would race down to the basement with just a dim oil lamp to guide him and proceed to process the victim for disposal.

First, Todd would strip the valuables from the body taking time to slit the victim's throat if necessary and then he would remove the deceased's clothing. Sweeney Todd would disjoint the limbs and sever them from the body, taking time to remove the skin, which was unusable for pies. Then, in the dank cavern, in just the flickering light of his oil lamps and candles, Todd would gut his poor victim like a hunter dresses a deer. All of the meat would be stripped from the bones, which he would pile off to the side, and the vital organs that would be ground up for pie fillings and the fresh meat would be boxed for delivery to Mrs. Lovett. The bones he would scatter amid the remains in the catacombs, where they were virtually indistinguishable from the bodies of persons who had died a more natural death.

No one believes that Mrs. Lovett was solely responsible for baking her renowned meat pies. A 1924 account states that she had a hired girl and a male pie maker who helped with the preparation. It was unlikely that either of them suspected where Mrs. Lovett's meat supply came from. St. Dunstan's was old and musty, but the smell, which permeated the church and sacristy, was putrid beyond comprehension. They had been burying people in the catacombs there for hundreds of years, and never before had the smell of decay and death been so prevalent. It got so bad that ladies attending the services would require a handkerchief scented with vinegar or perfume in order to sit through the services, and the parson himself was reported to "sneeze in the midst of discourse and to hold to his pious mouth a handkerchief, in which was some strong and pungent essence, for the purpose of trying to overcome the effluvia."

The matter went on for some months before anyone thought to contact the authorities to investigate. At first the church leaders were afraid that some sort of disease was rampant in the facility, and they contacted the London health department (such as it was in the 18th century), but a study of the parishioners and others nearby found no more deaths or sicknesses than normal. descending into the bowels of the church and inspecting the vaults they found there. None had been disturbed, although the stench was much stronger in the crypt. The sewers, which ran near the church, were also scrutinized, and they were found to be in working order and not leaking offal into the church

Officers found that Sweeney Todd had once been accused of theft of a pair of silver shoe buckles. The case had not stood up because the buckles were of a fairly common sort, but the woman who charged the barber with the theft was adamant that her husband, who had mysteriously disappeared one day, had worn the exact same buckles on his shoes. A constable was savvy enough to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire, and he put Todd's shop under a close watch. In typical bureaucratic fashion, the constable reported his suspicions to his superiors and was given the green light to "use whatever means might be necessary" to solve the mystery. Over the next several months, three Runners watching Sweeney's barbershop reported that men had entered the store for a shave or haircut and had not been seen to leave. The constable became more convinced that Todd was murdering clients, and that somehow, St. Dunstan's Church was involved. He decided to revisit the vaults, this time with a crew of Bow Street's finest, to get to the bottom of the issue. Armed with just a compass, walking stick, and oil lanterns, the men descended once again into the fetid stench of the church's crypt. After a few moments of searching they stumbled across the crypt of the Weston family, which had been one of the Demon Barber's favorite dumping grounds. What they found there was reported in the newspapers in gruesome detail: "Piled one upon each other and reaching halfway up to the ceiling, lay a decomposing mass of human remains. Heaped one upon another heedlessly tossed into the disgusting heap any way, lay pieces of gaunt skeletons with pieces of flesh here and there only adhering to the bones. Heads in a similar state of decay were tumbled about, the whole enough to strike such horror into the heart of any man," wrote the Courier in its account of Sweeney Todd's trial.

Coming to the horrible realization that they had finally located the source of the stench, the Bow Street Runners pressed on, following bloodstained footprints until they disappeared at the back of a shop, apparently on Bell Yard. The constable , who was known as an acute thinker, realized that Sweeney Todd was murdering his clients, and what was worse, he was disposing of the evidence by serving the meat in a pie. But still more evidence was needed. There was thought to be no way to identify the remains found in the Weston crypt, and no way to tie the murders to Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett, save for the gossips on Fleet Street. There was no requirement for a search warrant at the time, and Sir Richard ordered his men to accompany every customer into Sweeney Todd's barbershop to keep him from practicing his macabre craft until a Runner had a chance to search his apartment for more evidence. Undoubtedly, for the next several days, the Bow Street Runners were the most neatly shaved police force in the world as they kept tabs on the Demon Barber. The chance to search the house came two days after the discoveries beneath the church, and the Runner dispatched to the house was able to locate a veritable treasure trove of booty from Sweeney Todd's apartment. He noted the names and initials found in some of the clothing and jewelry and reported in to the constable.

Wasting no more time, constables dispatched a group of Runners to arrest Margery Lovett, and set out with another squad to pick up Sweeney Todd. The arrest of Mrs. Lovett was not without incident. When the Runners arrived at her shop, she was serving some of her ever-present customers and as they learned the horrid contents of their delicious meals, they attempted to kill Mrs. Lovett. The Runners were able to hurry Mrs. Lovett away in a waiting carriage, and she was taken to a cell in Newgate Prison.

The constables arrest of Sweeney Todd, on the other hand, went without incident. The barber was alone in his shop when the Bow Street Runners entered and clapped the handcuffs, or darbies, on the Demon Barber. He was already behind bars in Newgate Prison before any civilians knew he was involved in the horror of Bell Yard.

December 1801 when he was advised that Mrs. Lovett had poisoned herself in her cell at Newgate. How she came by the poison is unknown, but as a woman of means she might have been able to bribe a jailer, and authorities learned that she had had a delivery of some clothes from her home shortly before she died. Haining surmises that Lovett might have had poison hidden away in the clothes for just such a situation.

Be that as it may, the case of Rex v. Sweeney Todd will certainly be one of the trials of the age."

That prescient prediction by the newspaper was held to be true as the trial opened. Sweeney Todd had not been told of the death of Margery Lovett prior to his trial, and when he was informed, he apparently turned pale, "like some great, gaunt ghost." Todd was actually on trial for just one murder, that a seaman, Francis Thornhill. Despite the large number of bodies and the mountain of evidence found at his home, police could scarcely identify any other victims.

The attorney general, representing King George III, opened his case. A reporter for the Newgate Calendar the long-serving recorder of criminal behavior in England dutifully took down the statements.

"Mr. Thornhill had been commissioned to take a certain string of Oriental pearls, valued at 16,000 pounds, to a young lady in London," the prosecutor began. "He was anxious to fill this request, and as soon as the ship docked, went into the City with the pearls. It appears that upon his route to deliver them, he went into the shop of the prisoner at the bar to be shaved, and no one ever saw him again."

"Sweeney Todd's house was found crammed with property and clothing sufficient for 160 people," he said to the stunned courtroom. "Yes, gentlemen of the jury, I said 160 people, and among all that clothing was found a piece of jacket which will be sworn to have belonged to Francis Thornhill."There was still more evidence, the prosecutor said. "Is a piece of sleeve enough to convict a man? Wisely, the law says no and looks for the body of a murdered man," he said confidently. "We will produce that proof. For among the skeletons found contiguous to Todd's premises was one which will be sworn to as being that of the deceased Mr. Thornhill."

Colonel William Jeffrey took the stand for the prosecution and told how he had gone in search of Thornhill, and how he later sought the help of the Bow Street Runners. He descended into the catacomb with Sir Richard and a doctor, who removed a bone from a skeleton they found there. Jeffery made his mark upon the bone for identification. The defense counsel, appointed by the court to serve the Demon Barber, quickly went to the bizarre and circumstantial nature of the case against Sweeney Todd. To be sure, establishing innocence in the face of such hatred that the spectators felt for Sweeney Todd would be difficult, at best. But the defense counsel, whose name remains shrouded by the mists of time, gave it his all.

"Instead of evidence, near or remote fixing the deed upon him, we have nothing but long stories about vaults, bad odours in churches, moveable floorboards, chairs standing on their heads, secretpassagesand pork pies," he began. "Really, gentlemen of the jury, I do think that the manner in which the prosecution has been got up against my virtuous and pious client is an outrage to your common sense."

He then attacked the prosecution's pieces of evidence one by one. First, how could the disappearance of respectable men from their homes have anything to do with Sweeney Todd, he asked. Then, answering his own question, he said "We are told that the respectable men want to get shaved, and that Sir Richard Blunt had a shave several times at my client's shop, yet here he is quite alive and well to give evidence today. And what about the smell in St. Dunstan's? "You might as well say that my client committed felony because this court was not well ventilated!"

The most serious evidence against Sweeney Todd was the disappearance of Francis Thornhill. "Really, this is too bad. Hundreds of people may have seen him come out and no doubt did so but they happened not to know him. So just because no one passed the time of day with this man, my client is declared guilty of murder." Calling the prosecution's case "sophistry" he questioned the death of Margery Lovett. He placed the blame for the murders squarely on her shoulders and said that she accused Sweeney Todd, "a man well-known for his benevolence and piety," out of spite. Then declining to call any witnesses for the defense, he rested his case.

The judge quickly summed up the case for the jury. In the tradition of the time, his summation amounted to almost a restatement of the prosecution's case against Sweeney Todd. Then, he charged the jury to determine the guilt or innocence of the Demon Barber. The next phase of the trial, deliberation and sentencing, took less than 10 minutes. The jury retired to consider the details of the case and returned a guilty verdict after five minutes. The judge, placing a black cloth atop his white wig, asked Sweeney Todd if he had any words before sentence was passed.

"I am not guilty!" Todd shouted.

"It is now my painful duty to pass upon you the sentence of the law, which is that you be taken from here to a place of execution and hanged by the neck until dead. May Heaven have mercy upon you.

"You cannot expect that society can do otherwise than put out of life someone who, like yourself, has been a terror and a scourge."

On January 25, 1802, in the prison yard at Newgate, Sweeney Todd was strung up on the gallows before a crowd of thousands, where he apparently "died hard." After his execution, his body was given over to a handful of learned "barber-surgeons" where it was dissected. Sweeney Todd ended up, like so many of his victims, as a pile of meat and bones.


End file.
